The Easiest Biscuits Ever

Is there anything better than a light, fluffy biscuit straight from the oven, slathered in butter, and drizzled with honey? Excuse me a minute while I wipe the drool off my face. Biscuits are seriously the easiest things in the world to make. The only reason anyone messes them up is that they make them too complicated. 

All you need for really great biscuits are three ingredients. Yep, three. Buttermilk, self-rising flour, and butter. That's it! 

Buttermilk Biscuits (makes 6 biscuits. I usually double this recipe. Obviously)

2 cups self-rising flour

1/2 cup (1 stick) of butter

3/4 cup buttermilk

The technique is the important part. Preheat your oven to 425. You want a hot oven to brown up the outside quickly while leaving the inside melt-in-your-mouth tender. Measure your flour into a bowl. Make sure your butter is super cold. I take a stick of butter and cut it in half length-wise, turn it on its side and cut it length-wise again. The I slice it into cubes. Toss the cubes in with the flour. Then stir it around a little to coat each cube of butter with flour. Next take your pastry cutter and cut through all the butter again. Stir it up a little to coat the smaller chunks of butter with flour. Keep doing this until the cubes of butter are about the size of peas and are coated with flour. You want chunks of butter. 

Chunks are beautiful. Chunks are good. Not everybody does it, but everybody should... Sorry, I can't remember the name of my last child, but I can't forget music from the 80s. I may need help. Anyway, once those beautiful chunks of butter are small and coated with flour, add the buttermilk. Do not stir. At all. Like ever. Use your pastry cutter to scrape up the flour from the bottom of the bowl and dump it into the puddle of buttermilk. Turn your bowl a little, and do it again. Keep doing it until the puddle disappears. Use your fingers to scrape off the pastry cutter whenever it gets to gloppy. 

You will reach a point where you have a bunch of wet dough and a bunch of unmixed flour. Cut through the dough a couple of times with your pastry cutter and continue to toss it with flour until the flour is mostly mixed in. Now you need to get in there with your hands. Scrape all the dough from your pastry cutter and toss it in the sink. Now, press the dough together with your hands. You are not kneading bread here. No kneading. At all. Like ever. Just scoop it up and press all the loose bits into the rest of the dough. Press 3 or 4 times. 5 at the most. You don't want to handle biscuit dough too much. It should be lumpy. 

Mow you have a choice to make. Do you want to cut these biscuits, or drop these biscuits? Cut biscuits are prettier, and have layers. Dropped biscuits are quicker. I usually drop them, unless I need the biscuits for breakfast sandwiches or something. 

For cut biscuits (I don't call them rolled because I do not use a rolling pin on my biscuits. Like ever.), dust your counter with some flour. Lay your dough on top of it and press it into a square-ish shape that's about 1 inch thick. Dust it very, very lightly with flour and fold the dough in half. Press it into a square-ish shape that's about 1 inch thick. Do it 2 more times and you're done. You can cut the biscuits with a biscuit cutter, or you can just cut them into squares. 

To drop the biscuits, I cut the dough in half with a knife. Then I scoop off 1/3 of the dough from one of the halves and shape it into a disk that's about 1 inch thick. Repeat until you have 6 biscuits. 

I like to bake my biscuits in a buttered cast iron skillet, but any baking sheet works fine. Bake them at 425 degrees for about 15-18 minutes until they are lightly browned. Remove them from the oven, and brush the tops with butter. Then split them open and slather the insides with butter. And honey. Or jam. Ooooh, or sausage gravy.... I may never be skinny again... Enjoy your biscuits! Ta ta for now!